Social Media in Emergencies

Abstract

The value of social media in crises, disasters, and emergencies across different events (e.g. floods, storms, terroristic attacks), countries, and for heterogeneous participants (e.g. citizens, emergency services) is now well-attested. Existing work has examined the potentials and weaknesses of its use during specific events. Fewer studies, however, have focused on citizens' perceptions of social media in emergencies, and none have deployed a representative sample to examine this. We present the results of the first representative study on citizens' perception of social media in emergencies that we have conducted in Germany. Our study highlights, for example, that around half (45%) of people have used social media during an emergency to share and / or look for information. In contrast, false rumours on social media (74%) are perceived as a threat. Moreover, only a minority of people have downloaded a smartphone app for emergencies (16%), with the most popular ones' weather and first aid apps. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered Computing → Collaborative and Social Computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing

Using Entropy of Social Media Location Data for the Detection of Crowd Dynamics Anomalies

“…In this work, we are interested in detecting unusual events such as emergencies. In [23], the authors presented the results of a study on citizens' perception of social media in emergencies conducted in Germany. The study highlighted that around 24% of people have used social media during an emergency to share information.…”

European Expectations of Disaster Information provided by Critical Infrastructure Operators

“…Majority of research on how nationality and culture affect public perception of crisis communication have been done in regard to public relations (see for example, Yi-Hui, Wu, & Cheng, 2016;Zhu, Anagondahallib, & Zhang, 2017) and few have examined disasters as defined by this study. To the best of our knowledge, only one representative study on citizens' perceptions of social media in emergencies has been conducted in Germany (Reuter et al, 2017), making comparisons between nationalities difficult. However, the same study indicated that preliminary findings from a survey of UK citizens showed that differences do exist (Reuter et al, 2017).…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, only one representative study on citizens' perceptions of social media in emergencies has been conducted in Germany (Reuter et al, 2017), making comparisons between nationalities difficult. However, the same study indicated that preliminary findings from a survey of UK citizens showed that differences do exist (Reuter et al, 2017). Expectations of social media use in crisis most likely also depend on risk culture and social media culture, which are impacted by nationality.…”

“…This resonated with the findings of the survey, which suggested that 42% of European citizens expect emergency services to respond within one hour of them posting for help on their social media sites. A 2017 representative study of German citizens found that 67% of respondents expected emergency services to monitor social media and 47% expected a response within one hour of posting (Reuter et al, 2017).…”

“…Various national governments also have guides. Previous research in this emergent area has tended to focus solely upon how these actors or the public use social media in crisis times (The American Red Cross, 2009;Bruns, Burgess, Crawford, & Shaw, 2012;Imran, Castillo, Diaz, & Vieweg, 2015;Reuter & Kaufhold, 2018;Reuter, Kaufhold, Spielhofer, & Hahne, 2017;Reuter, Ludwig, Kaufhold, & Spielhofer, 2016), often overlooking the role played by another key stakeholder, critical infrastructure (CI) operators. Thus, there have been few empirical studies exploring public expectations of information shared by CI operators during crisis situations.…”